Joseph Haydn is never really forgotten. The great orchestras will occasionally trot out his Surprise or Drum Roll Symphony. His string quartets are regularly in the repertory of those who devote themselves to that very special form. In the Fifties, a few recording companies discovered his majestic and passionate God-saturated Masses—foremost among the dozen he wrote the Missa Sanctae Caeciliae and the Lord Nelson. We are frequently reminded that he was self-taught, and that his contract with Prince Esterházy, the patron he served for so many years of his life, required him to be “perfectly clean” and to wear the “correct livery.” And we are forever adjured to remember that he was “the forerunner of Beethoven” or that he was deeply in the debt of C. P. E. Bach.
His contemporaries saw him differently. Grétry could write of the Haydn orchestral music that it was “a vast dictionary of expression.” When he left Esterház in his later years, he was hailed in London and Vienna as one of the giants of music—Mozart and Beethoven concurring—though sometimes a little troubling, because he tended to be too far in advance of the time’s musical Geist. In his last years he was affectionately “Papa” Haydn, yet a monarch in his old-fashioned finery and powdered wig. Today, if we burrow among the pronouncements of a few perceptive musicologists, we are startled to see the image of a placid Haydn— somewhat in the rear of the felicities of Mozart’s Fortieth—shattered by such phrases as “demonic tones,” “harmonic intricacies of startling modernity,” and “angular musical language.”
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